Enlightenment Through Understanding

Neoliberalism

Neoconservatives also support free trade, markets, and are consequentialist, unlike the far-right. They also tend to have a more optimistic outlook than either the far-left or the far-right.

Neocons are typically consequentialist, supporting policy such as 2008 the bank bailouts, which created the risk of moral hazard over the long-run (and went against the ethos of ‘free market capitalism’) and was very unpopular with a lot of people, but may have been necessary to stem the bleeding from the financial system and boost confidence so that the healthier parts of the economy would not be weighed-down by the ailing banking and housing sector.

Also, Sam Bowman is from the UK. The European-equivalent of ‘liberal’ tends to be more further to the ‘left’ than the US-equivalent. Bill Clinton, despite running as a democrat, favored deregulation, welfare reform, and was tough on crime.

In response to an earlier post, someone counters that liberals are optimistic:

Small correction: as a far-leftist, we actually believe we’re (ie: Marxists, anarchists, other radicals) the inheritors of the Enlightenment and its tradition of emancipation, understanding, and happiness through the systematic application of reason. We do not have a pessimistic view of human potential merely because we object to Whig history. The opposite! We object to Whig history because we look at the world and believe that we can progress much further than the present day.

Not all Marxists and far-leftists agree on everything. Some Marxists believe technology may render jobs obsolete, and that this is a good thing, whereas many on the far-left want ‘full employment’ (examples being the Works Progress Administration by FDR in the 1930′s and the Obama stimulus in 2009).

Karl Marx, in a section of his Grundrisse that came to be known as the “Fragment on Machines”,[22][23] argued that the transition to a post-capitalist society combined with advances in automation would allow for significant reductions in labor needed to produce necessary goods, eventually reaching a point where all people would have significant amounts of leisure time to pursue science, the arts, and creative activities; a state some commentators later labeled as “post-scarcity”.[24] Marx argued that capitalism—the dynamic of economic growth based on capital accumulation—depends on exploiting the surplus labor of workers, but a post-capitalist society would allow for…

Neoliberals, unlike welfare liberals, are more receptive to post-labor economics. Also, the inheritors of ‘The Enlightenment’ are today’s neoliberals and classical liberals, and maybe some libertarians. Like Same Bowman above, they are generally optimistic about human nature, and support free trade, free dissemination of ideas, technology, markets, and some social safety net. Now contrast that to the far-left of today, such as BLM, SJWs, Sanders, and, in 2011, OWS. BLM, for example, has a very negative view of human nature, believing that blacks are being systematically oppressed by so-called ‘institutional racism’, a view also shared by SJWs. Sanders, rather create wealth and celebrate individual success, wants to fan the flames of class warfare. SJWs oppose free speech and support censorship of ‘offensive’ ideas and individuals, going so far as even protesting liberal professors (or anyone whom they deem as ‘privileged’). The far-left also subscribes to the notion of the ‘noble savage’ and that modern civilization and technology are inherently racist and oppressive, preferring that the world revert to a simpler and more egalitarian state.

Maybe I’ll make a spreadsheet to show the similarities and differences between these and other ideologies